Date: 14 June 2017
Country: Malta
Three Dune Voices journalists received the Migration Media Award at the recent ceremony held in Malta. Three awards for fact-based and impartial reporting on the complexity of the issue of migration that went to the journalists working with Dune Voices represent an official recognition of the Media Diversity Institute (MDI) work and its multimedia platform team.
One of the newly EU-established Migration Media awards went to Bennour Hussein, a Libyan journalist trained by MDI and Dune Voices together with 70 other reporters from Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. Hussein was awarded for a story about migrants and refugees in a camp in the Libyan town Gharyan published on the Dune Voices website. Chahreddine Berriah, one of the most productive Dune Voices reporters from Algeria, has been awarded for an article published in El Watan. Chahreddine wrote about the fate of Sub-Saharan migrants between Algeria and Morocco.
Set up by MDI in 2014, Dune Voices specialises in providing reliable, in depth, well investigated feature stories covering topics such as migration, conflict, security, women, youth, ethnic and religious minorities, giving a voice to marginalised groups and ordinary people inhabiting the Sahara region. Dune Voices report in Arabic and French while the best articles are translated into English. Diverse in its content and structure, this multimedia platform brings important stories from the heart of the Sahara via its own network of reporters.
Along with Hussein and Berriah, the Dune Voices editor-in-chief Rima Marrouch was awarded for her piece published on BBC Arabic website. Rima who worked as an editor with the Dune Voices reporters for several months wrote about a group of Syrian and Palestinian actors who found refuge in Berlin.
“High quality reporting as rewarded by the new journalistic competition is urgently needed to improve people’s understanding of migration,” say the organisers of the Migrant Media Award ceremony held in Malta on 14 June 2017.
An international jury, composed of reputable senior journalists, evaluated over 120 applications for the first edition of the Impressed with the quality of the previously published pieces and the proposals for future productions which this award scheme will fund, jury member Aidan White from the Ethical Journalism Network said: “This kind of reporting does great credit to the cause of public-interest journalism. It shines a powerful light on the humanitarian and policy challenges of the recent ‘migration crisis’. The authors raise questions that cannot be ignored and challenge those who come up with easy answers.”
The Migration Media Award is a new EU-funded journalism competition bringing together four partners based on the initiative of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). The EUROMED Migration IV and OPEN Media Hub projects, funded by the EU, developed the scheme in partnership with the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and Malta’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade Promotion.